Gil Smart: Our water wars are getting personal

Protesters gathered along the edge of the St. Lucie River to bring attention to the algae crisis to Sen. Marco Rubio, who visited the Treasure Coast on July 1 to examine the pollution in the St. Lucie River. (FILE PHOTO)

On several occasions, I've praised the enviro-activist group Bullsugar, which tends to be a little hard-core.

Which, I've said, is a good thing. That's not intended as a dig at the people and organizations who have spent years working for cleaner waters. But when, after all that work and all that concern, the problem gets worse, what happens? Some people may shrug their shoulders and accept their fate. Others push harder, unapologetically, ruffling a few (million?) feathers along the way.

But how far is too far?

I ask because of an incident that took place last weekend at Stuart's Dancin' in the Streets celebration. Bullsugar had a tent; Kevin Powers — vice chair of the South Florida Water Management District's Governing Board — and his wife Marsha, a Martin County School Board member, happened by.

Someone apparently asked Powers to sign the "Now or Neverglades" declaration, a petition being circulated by Bullsugar that calls for the acquisition of land south of Lake Okeechobee to store water and eliminate the need for discharges to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries.

The South Florida Water Management District isn't even interested in discussing a land buy until 2021 — after the state's final option to buy U.S. Sugar-owned land south of the lake expires. Bullsugar considers the district obstructionist — which is putting it kindly.

Bottom line, as you might guess, Powers declined to sign the declaration. What ensued, according to an email written by Marsha Powers and circulated widely (I had two separate people send it to me), was "heckling" and "bullying." Apparently, the Bullsugar folks or people goaded by Bullsugar started yelling at Powers, making a scene.

The water wars got personal.

The people who forwarded this email did so to say: Look at these Bullsugar thugs, they're a menace! But as Bullsugar member Chris Maroney told me, it's not as if the group's opponents have treated them with kid gloves, either. "If there has been any bullying going on, it has been personal attacks on us," Maroney wrote in an email. Among other things, he cited election-related mailers "filled with lies about Bullsugar and its personnel" after Bullsugar endorsed Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch for Martin County Commissioner.

Politics ain't beanbag, as the saying goes. This sort of thing comes with the territory when you become a public figure, or try to influence public policy.

Still, I'd like to think we can avoid what might be called the politics of personal confrontation. Because I feel like the country as a whole is lingering at the edge of that path, sorely tempted. And down that path lie dark things.

In an Aug. 24 essay in The Week, Damon Linker wrote that ours is an age of pessimism. Faith in public institutions has been falling; one recent Gallup poll showed only 8 percent of respondents had faith in Congress; 32 percent had faith in the Supreme Court; a mere 23 percent trust the criminal justice system.

Think about this in terms of Florida. Do you have faith in Florida government to fix our water problems? Do you have confidence Gov. Rick Scott and "the system," including the water district can — or will — solve the algae crisis?

If not — what do you do with that?

Sure, you try to vote the politicians seen as stifling change out of office, and maybe you succeed in some cases. But the sugar industry, which funds many of those politicians, is powerful. It has lots of money. So maybe, no matter how hard you try, the status quo endures.

Isn't that where we're at now? What follows this?

Writes Linker:

"People who believe their lives are likely to get worse over time tend not to accept that fate complacently. On the contrary, pessimists often end up searching for and tempted by would-be saviors — individuals or movements who promise to break the pattern of decline. But because the status quo is implicated in the decline, the individuals or movements that inspire the greatest hope for improvement are the often ones who threaten to do the most damage to the established order of things in preparation for a miraculous leap into a new and dramatically better world. Pessimism is a potent incubator of political radicalism."

What does that radicalism look like?

Well, maybe it looks like people confronting political opponents in the street.

The politics of personal destruction are usually waged at a distance — TV ads, letters to the editor, mailers, maybe debates where you don't really expect it to escalate.

But when a political system proves itself incapable of delivering improvement, when the conditions that fueled the anger persist or even worsen — maybe it can only escalate.

I'd like to think that here, at least, we can avoid that. But for that to happen there has to be reason for optimism — rather than a sense that nothing will ever change.

About Gil Smart

Gil Smart is a columnist for Treasure Coast Newspapers and a member of the Editorial Board. His columns reflect his opinion. Readers may reach him at gil.smart@tcpalm.com, by phone at 772-223-4741 or via Twitter at @TCPalmGilSmart.